The Chronoliths

by Robert Charles Wilson

  “Ah.”

  “And of course your name was on it. We were thinking of bringing all those people in, anybody we could find, for blood testing and whatever, but we decided against it — too much work, too invasive, not likely to produce any substantive results. Plus there were civil-liberties problems. But I remembered your name on that list. I knew it was you because they had practically your entire life history down there, including Cornell, including a hypertext link to me.”

  And again I thought of Hitch Paley. His name would have been on that list, too. Maybe they had looked a little more deeply into his business activities since then. Maybe Hitch was in jail. Maybe that was why there had been no pickup that day at Easy’s Packages and no word from him since.

  But of course I didn’t say any of this to Sue.

  She went on, “Well, I made a kind of mental note of it, but that was that, at least until recently. What you have to understand, Scotty, is that the evolution of this crisis has made everyone a lot more paranoid. Maybe justifiably paranoid. Especially since Yichang; Yichang just drove everybody completely bugfuck. You know how many people were killed by floodwater alone? Not to mention that it was the first nuclear device detonated in a kind-of-sort-of war since before the turn of the century.”

  She didn’t have to tell me. I’d been paying attention. It was not even slightly surprising to learn that the NSA or CIA or FBI was profoundly involved with Sue’s research. The Chronoliths had become, at bottom, a defense issue. The image lurking at the back of everyone’s mind — seldom spoken, seldom explicit — was of a Chronolith on American soil: Kuin towering over Houston or New York or Washington.

  “So when I saw your name again… well, it was on a different kind of list. The FBI is looking into witnesses again. I mean, they’ve been sort of keeping an eye on you since the word go. Not exactly surveillance, but if you moved out of state or something like that, it would be noted, it would go in your file…”

  “Christ, Sue!”

  “But all that was harmless busywork. Until lately. Your work at Campion-Miller came up on the radar.”

  “I write business software. I don’t see—”

  “That’s way too coy, Scotty. You’ve done some really sensitive work with marketing heuristics and collective anticipation. I’ve looked at your code—”

  “You’ve seen Campion-Miller source code?”

  “Campion-Miller elected to share it with the authorities.”

  I began to put this together. An interrogatory FBI visit at Campion-Miller could easily have alarmed management, especially if it was core code that had come under scrutiny. And it would explain Arnie Kunderson’s strange intransigence, the don’t-ask-don’t-tell atmosphere that had surrounded the firing.

  “You’re telling me you got me fired?”

  “It was nobody’s intention for you to lose your job. As it happens, though, that’s kind of handy.”

  Handy was about the last word I would have used.

  “See, Scotty, how this hooks together? You’re on the spot when the Chumphon Chronolith arrives, which marks you for life all by itself. Now, five years later, it turns out you’re evolving algorithms that are deeply pertinent to the research we’re doing here.”

  “Are they?”

  “Trust me. It flagged your file. I put in a good word for you, and that kept them off your tail a little bit, but I have to be frank with you, some very powerful people are getting way too excited. It’s not just Yichang, it’s the economy, the riots, all that trouble during the last election… the level of nervousness is indescribable. So when I heard you got fired I had the brilliant idea of getting you placed here.”

  “As what, a prisoner?”

  “Hardly. I’m serious about your work, Scotty. In terms of code husbandry, it’s absolutely fine. And very, very pertinent. Maybe it doesn’t seem so, but a great deal of what I’ve been looking at lately is modeling the effect of anticipation on mass behavior. Applying feedback and recursion theory to both physical events and human behavior.”

  “I’m a keyboard hack, Sue. I’ve grown algorithms I don’t pretend to understand.”

  “You’re too modest. This is key work. And it would be much nicer, frankly, if you were doing it for us.”

  “I don’t understand. Is it my work you’re interested in, or the fact that I was at Chumphon?”

  “Both. I suspect it’s not coincidental.”

  “But it is.”

  “Yes, in the conventional sense, but — oh, Scotty, this is too much to talk about over the phone. You need to come see me.”

  “Sue—”

  “You’re going to tell me you feel like I put your head in a blender. You’re going to tell me you can’t make a decision like this while you’re standing in your PJs drinking bottled beer and feeling sorry for yourself.”

  I was wearing jeans and a sweatshirt. Otherwise, she was on the mark.

  “So don’t decide,” she said. “But do come see me. Come to Baltimore. My expense. We can talk about it then. I’ll make arrangements.”

  One of the salient facts about Sulamith Chopra is that when she says she means to do a thing, she does it.

  The recession had hit Baltimore harder than it had hit Minneapolis/St. Paul. The city had done all right in the young years of the century, but the downtown core had lost that brief sheen of prosperity, had faded into empty storefronts, cracked plasma displays, gaudy billboards turned pastel by sun and weather.

  Sue parked at the back of a small Mexican restaurant and escorted me inside. The restaurant staff recognized her and greeted her by name. Our waitress was dressed as if she had stepped out of a 17th-century mission but recited the daily specials in a clipped New England accent. She smiled at Sue the way a tenant farmer might smile at a benevolent landlord — I gathered Sue was a generous tipper.

  We talked for a while about nothing in particular — current events, the Oglalla crisis, the Pemberton trial. This was Sue’s attempt to re-establish the tone of the relationship between us, the familial intimacy she had established with all her students at Cornell. She had never liked being treated as a figure of authority. She deferred to no one and hated being deferred to. Sue was old-fashioned enough to envision working scientists as equal plaintiffs before the absolute bar of truth.

  Since Cornell, she said, the Chronolith project had taken up more and more of her time; had become, in effect, her career. She had published important theoretical papers during this time, but only after they had been vetted by national security. “And the most important work we’ve done can’t be published at all, for fear that we’d be putting the weapon into Kuin’s hands.”

  “So you know more than you can say.”

  “Yes, lots… but not enough.” The waitress brought rice and beans. Sue tucked into her lunch, frowning. “I know about you, too, Scotty. You divorced Janice, or vice versa. Your daughter lives with her mom now. Janice remarried. You did five years of good but extremely circumscribed work at Campion-Miller, which is a shame, because you’re one of the brightest people I know. Not genius-in-a-wheelchair smart, but bright. You could do better.”

  “That’s what they always used to write on my report cards — ‘could do better.’”

  “Did you ever get over Janice?”

  Sue asked intimate questions with the brusqueness of a census taker. I don’t think it even occurred to her that she might be giving offense.

  Hence no offense taken.

  “Mostly,” I said.

  “And the girl? Kaitlin, is it? God, I remember when Janice was pregnant. That big belly of hers. Like she was trying to shoplift a Volkswagen.”

  “Kait and I get on all right.”

  “You still love your daughter?”

  “Yes, Sue, I still love my daughter.”

  “Of course you do. How Scotty of you.” She seemed genuinely pleased.

  “Well, how about you? You have anything going?”

  “Well,” she said. “I live alone. There’s somebod
y I see once in a while, but it’s not a relationship.” Sue lowered her eyes and added, “She’s a poet. The kind of poet who works retail by daylight. I can’t bring myself to tell her the FBI already looked into her background. She’d go ballistic. Anyway, she sees other people too. We’re nonmonogamous. Polyamorous. Mostly we’re barely even together.”

  I raised a glass. “Strange days.”

  “Strange days. Skol. By the way, I hear you’re not speaking to your father.”

  I almost choked.

  “Saw your phone records,” she explained. “He makes the calls. They don’t last more than thirty seconds.”

  “It’s kind of a race,” I said. “See who hangs up first. Goddammit, Sue, those are private calls.”

  “He’s sick, Scotty.”

  “Tell me about it.”

  “No, really. You know about the emphysema, I guess. But he’s been seeing an oncologist. Liver cancer, nonresponsive, metastatic.”

  I put down my fork.

  “Oh, Scotty,” she said. “I’m sorry.”

  “You realize, I don’t know you.”

  “Of course you know me.”

  “I knew you a long time ago. Not intimately. I knew a junior academic, not a woman who gets me fired — and bugs my fucking phone.”

  “There’s no such thing as privacy anymore, not really.”

  “He’s, what, dying?”

  “Probably.” Her face fell when she realized what she’d said. “Oh, God — forgive me, Scott. I speak before I think. It’s like I’m some kind of borderline autistic or something.”

  That, at least, I did know about her. I’m sure Sue’s defect has been named and genetically mapped, some mild inability to read or predict the feelings of others. And she loved to talk — at least in those days.

  “None of my business,” she said. “You’re right.”

  “I don’t need a surrogate parent. I’m not even sure I need this job.”

  “Scotty, I’m not the one who started logging your calls. You can take this job or not, but walking away won’t give you a normal life. You surrendered that in Chumphon, whether you knew it or not.”

  I thought, My father is dying.

  I wondered whether I cared.

  Back in the car, Sue remained apologetic. “Is it wrong of me to point out that we’re both in a bind? That both our lives have been shaped by the Chronoliths in ways we can’t control? But I’m trying to do the best thing, Scotty. I need you here, and I think the work would be more satisfying than what you were doing at Campion-Miller.” She drove through a yellow light, blinking at the reprimand that flashed on her heads-up. “Am I wrong to suspect that you want to get involved with what we’re doing?”

  No, but I didn’t give her the satisfaction of saying so.

  “Also—” Was she blushing? “Frankly, I’d enjoy your company.”

  “You must have lots of company.”

  “I have colleagues, not company. Nobody real. Besides, you know it’s not a bad offer. Not in the kind of world we’re living in.” She added, almost coyly, “And you get to travel. See foreign lands. Witness miracles.”

  Stranger than science.

  Six

  In the grand tradition of federal employment, I waited three weeks while nothing happened. Sulamith Chopra’s employers put me up in a motel room and left me there. My calls to Sue were routed through a functionary named Morris Torrance, who advised me to be patient. Room service was free, but man was not meant to live by room service alone. I didn’t want to give up my Minneapolis apartment until I had signed something permanent, and every day I spent in Maryland represented a net fiscal loss.

  The motel terminal was almost certainly tapped, and I presumed the FBI had found a way to read my portable panel even before its signal reached a satellite. Nevertheless I did what they probably expected me to do: I continued to collect Kuin data, and looked a little more closely at some of Sue’s publications.

  She had published two important papers in the Nature nexus and one on the Science site. All three were concerned with matters I wasn’t competent to judge and which seemed only distantly related to the question of the Chronoliths: “A Hypothetical Tauon Unification Energy,” “Non-Hadronic Material Structures,” “Gravitation and Temporal Binding Forces.” All I could discern from the text was that Sue had been breeding some interesting solutions to fundamental physical problems. The papers were focused and, to me, opaque, not unlike Sue herself.

  I spent some of that time thinking about Sue. She had been, of course, more than a teacher to those of us who came to know her. But she had never been very forthcoming about her own life. Born in Madras, she had immigrated with her parents at the age of three. Her childhood had been hermetic, her attention divided between schoolwork and her burgeoning intellectual interests. She was gay, of course, but seldom spoke about her partners, who never seemed to stick around for long, and she hadn’t discussed what her coming out might have meant to her parents, whom she described as “fairly conservative, somewhat religious.” She gave the impression that these were trivial issues, unworthy of attention. If she harbored old pain, it was well concealed.

  There was joy in her life, but she expressed it in her work — she worked with an enthusiasm that was unmistakably authentic. Her work, or her capacity to do her work, was the prize life had handed her, and she considered it adequate compensation for whatever else she might lack. Her pleasures were deep but monkish.

  Surely there was more to Sue than this. But this was what she had been willing to share.

  “A Hypothetical Tauon Unification Energy.” What did that mean?

  It meant she had looked closely at the clockwork of the universe. It meant she felt at home with fundamental things.

  I was lonely but too unsettled to do anything about it and bored enough that I had begun to scan the cars in the motel parking lot to see if I could spot the one with my FBI surveillance crew inside, should there be such a vehicle.

  But when I finally did interact with the FBI there was nothing subtle about the encounter. Morris Torrance called to tell me I had an appointment at the Federal Building downtown and that I should expect to provide a blood sample and submit to a polygraph examination. That it should be necessary to hurdle these obstacles in order to obtain gainful employment as Sue Chopra’s code herder was an indication of how seriously the government took her research, or at least the congressional investment in it.

  Even so, Morris had underestimated what would be required of me at the Federal Building. I submitted not only to the drawing of blood but to a chest X-ray and a cranial laser scan. I was relieved of urine, stool, and hair samples. I was fingerprinted, I signed a release for chromosomal sequencing, and I was escorted to the polygraph chamber.

  In the hours since Morris Torrance mentioned the word “polygraph” on the telephone I had entertained but a single thought: Hitch Paley.

  The problem was that I knew things about Hitch that could put him in prison, assuming he wasn’t there already. Hitch had never been my closest friend and I wasn’t sure what degree of loyalty I owed him, these many years later. But I had decided over the course of a sleepless night that I would turn down Sue’s job offer sooner than I would endanger his freedom. Yes, Hitch was a criminal, and putting him in jail may have been what the letter of the law required; but I didn’t see the justice in caging a man for selling marijuana to affluent dilettantes who would otherwise have invested their cash in vodka coolers, coke, or methamphetamines.

  Not that Hitch was particularly scrupulous about what he sold. But I was scrupulous about who I sold.

  The polygraph examiner looked more like a bouncer than a doctor, despite his white coat, and the unavoidable Morris Torrance joined us in the bare clinic room to oversee the test. Morris was plainly a federal employee, maybe thirty pounds above his ideal weight and ten years past his prime. His hair had receded in the way that makes some middle-aged men look tonsured. But his handshake was firm, his manner relaxed, and he
didn’t seem actively hostile.

  I let the examiner fix the electrodes to my body and I answered the baseline questions without stammering. Morris then took over the dialogue and began to walk me detail-by-detail through my initial experience with the Chumphon Chronolith, pausing occasionally while the polygraph guru added written notations to a scrolling printout. (The machinery seemed antiquated, and it was, designed to specifications laid down in 20th-century case law.) I told the story truthfully if carefully, and I did not hesitate to mention Hitch Paley’s name if not his occupation, even adding a little fillip about the bait shop, which was after all a legitimate business, at least some of the time.

  When I came to the part about the Bangkok prison, Morris asked, “Were you searched for drugs?”

  “I was searched more than once. Maybe for drugs, I don’t know.”

  “Were any drugs or banned substances found on your person?”

  “No.”

  “Have you carried banned substances across national or state borders?”

  “No.”

  “Were you warned of the appearance of the Chronolith before it arrived? Did you have any prior knowledge of the event?”

  “No.”

  “It came as a surprise to you?”

  “Yes.”

  “Do you know the name Kuin?”

  “Only from the news.”

  “Have you seen the image carved into the contemporary monuments?”

  “Yes.”

  “Is the face familiar? Do you recognize the face?”

  “No.”

  Morris nodded and then conferred privately with the polygraph examiner. After a few minutes of this I was cut loose from the machine.

  Morris walked me out of the building. I said, “Did I pass?”

  He just smiled. “Not my department. But I wouldn’t worry if I was you.”